At the end of this month, Roger Pulvers will be leaving Counterpoint. In his last three columns since his inaugural weekly Counterpoint on April 3, 2005, he will consider in turn Japan in the past, present and future.

Let us take the year 1890 to begin with.

In that year Lafcadio Hearn arrived in Japan. Of course, the arrival of a Greek-Irish journalist was of little or no import; and none could then have known that 1890 would be precisely midway between the beginning of the Meiji Era in 1868 and its end, with the death of Emperor Mutsuhito (posthumously, Emperor Meiji) in 1912.